While preparing for the second season of his television-adaptation homage Fargo, show-runner Noah Hawley became interested in the work of David Wood, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist whose recent three-part series placed moral injury as the “signature wound” of veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“It’s literally the idea that soldiers are asked to do things in wartime that would be considered immoral in peacetime,” Hawley recently explained over the phone. “So they come back and they can’t shake the feeling that they’re bad people. Because if you shoot a 15-year-old boy in peacetime, you go to jail. If you do it in wartime, you get away with it. When you do that in a just war that you believe in, that makes moral sense, you can rationalize it. When you do it in an unjust war like Vietnam, then you’re a little bit at sea.”

That moral fogginess didn’t fade after Vietnam, and the post-9/11 wars have brought home even more veterans susceptible to the “ethical ambiguity” Wood explores. So even though Fargo Season 2, debuting Monday night on FX, takes the series even further afield from its cinematic roots and into post-Watergate paranoia and trauma, it’s also putting a keen eye toward the present. And whether by accident or design, that 1970s post-conflict setting has its finger on the pulse of issues—feminism, Black Lives Matter, and post-traumatic stress—that are at the forefront of American cultural discussions today.

Jesse Plemons as Ed Blomquist by Mathias Clamer/FX

Fargo’s first season drew almost unanimous critical praise and some awards attention. But it was also a madcap project that never should have worked at all, let alone worked as well as it did. Actress Cristin Milioti, speaking for legions of Coen brothers fans, told me that before she was cast in Season 2 she hadn’t watched the first season because “I didn’t want one of my favorite films in any way affected.”

Based on, but not actually an adaptation of, the beloved 1996 Coen brothers Midwestern crime story of the same name, Season 1 starred newcomer Allison Tolman as Molly Solverson, an earnest, dogged cop that proved to be a riff on Frances McDormand’s Oscar-winning turn as Marge Gunderson. Season 2 takes the riff even wider and follows Molly’s father, Lou Solverson (Keith Carradine in Season 1 and Patrick Wilson in Season 2), back to post–Vietnam War Minnesota as he investigates a massacre in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Milioti and Ted Danson co-star as Lou Solverson’s wife and father-in-law, respectively. Jean Smart, Jeffrey Donovan, Kieran Culkin, Brad Garrett, and Bokeem Woodbine play members of warring Midwestern crime syndicates. And Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons play a seemingly nice married Midwestern couple who get swept up in Fargo’s frosty world of murder and moral compromise.

The setting allows the ensemble cast a deeper exploration of sticky moral quandaries. In the previous two versions of Fargo this was taken to Old Testament lengths: a primordial struggle between good and evil. With the lens of Season 2 looking all the way back to 1979, Hawley turns a sharp eye to the moral turmoil of a nation—then and now. The aftermath of war bleeds into every corner of Fargo Season 2. Almost every character pauses at some point or another to tell an anecdote from Vietnam, Korea, or the Western Front.

Patrick Wilson as Lou Solverson by Chris Large/FX

“The war references—both Vietnam and World War II—the oil crisis, Reagan coming in,” star Patrick Wilson told me, “that is the benefit of the 70s to play in. It was such a strange time.”

Hawley said that military conflict isn’t the only war that marks Fargo Season 2. “A lot of it had to do with my desire to try to dramatize the American identity in that moment at a time where the positive revolutionary 60s would turn into this violent radical 70s. It seemed like all the disenfranchised groups, the American Indian movement and the Black Panther Party and second-wave feminism, it just seemed like everyone was going to fight and finally get their seat at the table.”

And it’s there that Fargo Season 2 leans forward from the 70s to have a dialogue with 2015. Bokeem Woodbine plays Mike Milligan, a high-ranking gangster who, alongside his silent sidekicks the Kitchen brothers, gets the lion’s share of the dry Fargo humor in the first four episodes. He’s also, significantly, the only black face in a sea of Caucasian Midwesterners.

Milligan runs afoul of both the heroic cops at the center of the story, resulting in a series of tense standoffs between himself and white men in uniform. While Milligan himself might not be all that politically aware—“He’s not a civil-rights activist, per se. He’s a Mike Milligan advocate”—Woodbine certainly recognized the resonance of his character’s showdown with white men in uniform.

“I was definitely aware of the connotations given the current historical climate and even in my own personal life,” he said. “I dealt with similar things growing up in terms of my own personal interactions with law enforcement. I never really talked about [it] with the other actors and the director or anything like that because, as a professional, you’re just going to do your job, but it was a powerful feeling making those scenes with those great actors given the circumstances of what was going on in the world right at that time we were filming.”

Nick Offerman as Karl Weathers by Chris Large/FX

Where a lesser show might stew in all that chaotic violence and depravity, Fargo, imbued with its Coen D.N.A., takes a mercifully lighter approach. The paranoia and disenfranchisement of post-Vietnam era is occasionally played for laughs. Most notably in a vet character Karl Weathers, played by Nick Offerman, or a U.F.O./alien plot that threads through Season 2. But Jeffrey Donovan, who plays the brutish Dodd Gerhardt, pointed out, “In the 70s imagination and the fear that’s going on, that’s what’s playing on these people’s psyche: this kind of collective delusion, and how impressionable they all are. Remember, we just came out of Khrushchev and Nixon and we’re terrified of the Cold War and Vietnam. Everyone foreign was always a threat.”

“In the first year we didn’t have this paradigm and the movie didn’t really have this paradigm either, which is this heroic male character, right?” Hawley said, speaking about Wilson’s Lou Solverson. Both Lou and Hank Larsson (Danson), Hawley said, are “that competent American male who’s been to war, who’s had their mettle tested, and knows what they’re capable of in those moments.”

Jean Smart as Floyd Gerhardt by Mathias Clamer/FX

It’s not just the men who are at sea in Fargo’s new world. Jean Smart plays an embattled crime-family matriarch named, improbably, Floyd Gerhardt, who lost her first son in the Korean War. “There’s not too much you can do to a woman after she’s lost a child, I think,” Smart said. “There’s not too much more that can daunt her or scare her after that.”

Later in the season we learn that Dunst’s character lost a fiancé in Vietnam. “That really damaged her, and I think part of the culture is to brush things under the rug,” Dunst said. “When you do that for too long, it’s going to manifest in ugly ways and rear its head.”

The year 1979 was also the height of second-wave feminism, a term that even now women are grappling with and learning to embrace. How would the women of Fargo—Midwestern wives who run the gamut of the moral spectrum—field the de rigeur interview question of 2015? Would they consider themselves feminists?

“I think she would never probably put it that way,” Smart said of her character. “I think only in terms of it being, again, a practical matter, is that a woman should be able to do whatever man can do because that’s sometimes what you need to do to survive.” Dunst said of her bubbly self-improvement-obsessed character, Peggy, “I think she would think that sounded cool. She would be like, ‘Great, I love it. I’m going to use that word. I’m going to go Lifespring and I’m going to become a feminist.’”

“If it was nothing but a bunch of dudes and Jean Smart’s character, I’d still be like there’s nothing else like this on television,” Milioti said, expanding her answer to encompass all the women of Fargo. “I have not personally seen any writing for female roles like this. It’s like seeing a fucking unicorn, to be honest with you. Excuse my French. It’s like seeing a unicorn where you’re like, ‘Oh my God. A strong woman who is complex and has flaws? Call the press!’”

Cristin Milioti as Betsy Solverson by Mathias Clamer/FX

Without going into specifics, Milioti suggested that in her post–How I Met Your Mother career, the roles she’s been offered have been far less interesting. “The sort of manic-pixie dream role, the whole sort of virgin angel. Like the sweet girl next door who is just a little misunderstood. I don’t know any woman like that. The women I know and I love are all deeply flawed individuals who are trying their best. I see that on Fargo.”

Dunst said she had been looking around for a while for a TV project before finally finding what she wanted in* Fargo.* “TV is so much better and so much more exposure too. It’s like people actually watch TV shows. You do an independent film and people are like, ‘I saw it on the plane!’ Like, great! Why did I even do this for no money? You know what I mean? If no one’s seeing it. TV is the best medium for, I think, actresses especially. Of the roles I’ve gotten, Peggy is definitely one of the best—in terms of a challenge and growing with her for 10 episodes. I really got to run the gamut.”

You can trace these juicy parts for the women of Fargo all the way back to McDormand and the Coen brothers, and even without the intrepid Molly Solverson at the center this year, Hawley said, “I think that a huge part of the identity of what we call Fargo is female. Even though we don’t have that character, we’re able to geometrically expand looking at the female roles, both in this region and also in a crime story.”

Dunst is eager to give Hawley his fair share of the credit. “We all have stellar roles in this, and that doesn’t happen where there’s a few great roles for women in one TV show. And, all so different too. It’s all Noah,” Dunst said, pointing out that Hawley was raised by feminist activist and author Louise Armstrong.

Like many of the other shows in the crowded “peak TV” field, Fargo is about blood and mayhem, and pursues big, bold ideas about the dark heart of America. But unlike any of its competition, Fargo also pursues a fundamental decency in people; in a landscape flooded with antiheroes and guilty-pleasure soap operas, a show about good people and bona-fide heroes is rare. According to Hawley, television and Hollywood have jacked up our expectations of heroism to the point where “stories begin to be completely unlike life. This idea [of] this tortured demon hunter who’s the only one who’s fit to solve these cases because he’s been down that road and can put himself into the mind of the killer and that destroys his life. It’s exhausting.”

To Hawley, this is the great legacy of Fargo the movie. “Fargo was about this really decent person, not a super cop. She never got past dealer plates; she is probably in over her head, and so you worry about her. Then in the end, when she somehow managed through her great strength of character and American pluck to survive it and even prevail, her reward is that tomorrow’s a normal day.”

But not a normal day without darkness or depth. When I asked Hawley if it was a challenge to keep a story about nice “aw shucks” Midwesterners interesting, he replied, “I think even by saying that, you do Midwesterners a disservice.” In Fargo you can have apple-cheeked butchers un-ironically offer up a pleasant “O.K. then,” all the while there’s something more than pork ominously running through the meat grinder.